Cream stew (kurimu shichu) is a mild, white Japanese stew of chicken and vegetables bound in a milk-and-roux sauce. Chicken, onion, carrot and potato are sauteed and simmered until tender, then thickened with a butter-and-flour roux loosened with milk into a smooth, pale, lightly seasoned béchamel-style sauce; broccoli is often added near the end. It is gently savory rather than rich or spicy, served hot in a bowl, usually with—or sometimes poured over—white rice or with bread. A home-cooking and school-lunch staple, it is firmly a yoshoku dish and the white counterpart to Japanese curry.
Cream stew is a yoshoku adaptation of European milk-based stews. A precursor—a stew enriched with milk and dumplings—appears in Tezuka Kaneko's 1924 home-cooking cookbook, but the dish's spread is tied to the postwar school-lunch program: from 1947, skimmed milk powder supplied to nourish malnourished children was worked into a school-lunch stew that the authorities promoted as 'white stew' (shiroi shichu). It became a household dish after House Foods launched Japan's first instant cream-stew roux, 'Cream Stew Mix,' in 1966, developed by adapting the approach of curry roux; its early packaging even carried the words 'Irish Stew.' The product was a major hit within about a year, and the name 'cream stew' became fixed in its wake.
A good cream stew is creamy and comforting without being heavy: the sauce coats a spoon but still flows, tastes gently of milk and softened onion, and is seasoned just enough to be savory, not bland. The chicken is tender and the potato and carrot are soft enough to break with a spoon, while broccoli added late keeps a little bite and color. It is warming and mild—a dish for cold weather and children. A poor one is gluey and floury from a roux that was not cooked out or too much flour, or thin and watery; an over-reduced one turns pasty and dull.
The body of the stew is a béchamel: a roux of butter and flour cooked together, then milk whisked in. Cooking the flour in fat first coats the starch granules in oil so that when liquid is added they hydrate and swell separately instead of clumping, and gentle cooking drives off the raw-flour taste; the swollen, gelatinized starch is what thickens the milk into a smooth, opaque sauce. Adding cold or warm milk gradually while whisking prevents lumps. Sauteing the onion first builds a sweet, savory base through the Maillard reaction and softens its harshness, and the chicken bones and meat add gentle umami to the simmering liquid. Dairy curdles and the sauce can split if boiled too hard, so the stew is finished at a gentle simmer; the late-added broccoli is kept crisp by short cooking.
Variations
The classic is chicken (toriniku), but seafood versions with shrimp, scallop and white fish are common, as are all-vegetable ones. Most home cooks use a boxed instant roux block, while from-scratch versions build the béchamel by hand and may enrich it with fresh cream. A well-known regional style is Hokkaido cream stew, marketed around the region's dairy. The white stew sits alongside its darker yoshoku siblings—Japanese curry and the brown 'hayashi' and demi-glace-based 'beef stew'—and a popular variant pours the stew over rice rather than serving it on the side.
On the Palate
Where Cream Stew sits in the Japanese flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 4
How it's made
8 steps · 20 min
- 110 min
Cut the chicken into bite-size pieces and chop the onion, carrot and potato into chunks; cut the broccoli into florets.
- 26 min
Saute the chicken in butter until the surface colors, then add the onion and cook until softened.
- 312 min
Add the carrot and potato, pour in water or stock, and simmer until the vegetables are nearly tender.
- 44 min
In a separate pan, melt butter, stir in the flour, and cook the roux gently without browning it.
Watch outCook the roux until it smells nutty and foams but stays pale — let it color and you lose the white sauce; too raw and it tastes of flour.
- 54 min
Whisk the milk into the roux a little at a time to make a smooth white sauce.
Watch outAdd the milk in small splashes, whisking each in fully before the next — dump it all at once and the sauce seizes into lumps you can't smooth out.
- 66 min
Stir the white sauce into the simmering pot and cook gently until the stew thickens, stirring so it does not catch.
Watch outOnce the white sauce goes in keep stirring across the base — it thickens now and settles fast, and a scorched bottom turns the whole stew bitter.
- 74 min
Add the broccoli and simmer briefly until just tender; season with salt and pepper.
- 82 min
Serve hot in bowls, with rice or bread alongside.
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